Employment History

My only full-time job since university has been with
System Simulation Ltd.
(http://www.ssl.co.uk).
We're a small independent software house of about fifteen people.
We provide integrated
database solutions, based on our proprietary information management
system Index+.

My own responsibilities have covered the whole gamut of what we do,
from design, implementation and maintenance of the central database
software (B-tree indexes, structured storage etc.), through targeting
that technology to specific applications. My work has included every
phase in the delivery of complete running systems: analysis, design,
programming, testing, debugging, documentation, presentation,
training, maintenance, etc. I have also managed other staff
through these tasks, and representated SSL on a variety of
collaborative projects involving partners from across the EEC and
occasionally elsewhere.

One of my SSL projects (PLATO) won a BCS gold medal in 1995; two other
SSL projects on which I have worked have won awards in 1996 (ROCKnROM)
and 1997 (the Index+ system itself.)

Education

1986-1989

Warwick University.
Studied Mathematics with Computer Science,
graduating with a 2.ii. Founded and administrated a
recreational computer society which grew to become to the second
largest society on campus.

1979-1985

Bishop's Stortford Boys High School.
Passed eleven 'O' levels (Maths, Additional Maths, Physics, Chemistry,
Biology, English Language, English Literature, French, German, Music
and General Studies), four 'A' levels (Maths at grade A and Physics,
Chemistry and Further Maths all at grade C) and
grade 6 music theory and practice (playing clarinet).

Not-For-Profit (Spare Time) Projects

1998-1999

Zthes: a Z39.50 Profile for Thesaurus Navigation.
I've led a small informal working group,
communicating only by email, to evolve a specification for using the
Z39.50 information retrieval protocol to navigate hierarchical
thesauri as described in ISO 2788.
This has progressed rapidly to the point where a profile document
(http://www.n-four.demon.co.uk/mirk/zthes-02.html)
was presented to the March '99 ZIG meeting in Palo Alto, California.

1998-

yaSQL. (Yet Another SQL).
I have designed and implemented an engine-independent compiler for a
significant subset of the SQL relational query language.

1995-1996

sm3.
I designed and implemented sm3
(Sort Mail, 3rd re-write), a generic regexp-driven email redirector
which interfaces with sendmail.

1994-1998

A device-independent HTML parser.

1988-1989

MUNDI.
``The first multi-user dungeon to run over the internet''.

Skills

Operating Systems

Unix (Solaris, OSF/1, SCO, Linux and more);
MS-Windows (3.x, 95/98).

Programming Languages

C/C++;
the numerous ``little languages'' of Unix such as sh,
sed, awk and perl;
Visual Basic;
Vestiges of Pascal, Lisp and FORTRAN.